Ever feel like life is one big revolving door? It’s spinning so fast that you can’t tell where you want to get off, or how to get off. Sometimes I feel like the little kid—so worried that I’m going to get crushed that I just keep spinning ’round and ’round in the same door, never going anywhere. Design can often feel like this whether working from home (i.e., me) or in a corporate office; sometimes it feels like you’ve been spinning for a while and you begin to wonder, ‘Should I have stepped through the door back there?’ This was the very question I wrestled with when I decided to head home and start Green Couch Design with Meg.

The key to working from home and not turning into the creepy cat lady next door is culture. In fact, culture is the key to knowing what, when, where, and why about most things design. This past week Meg and I had the opportunity to go past Untitled Art Space and partake of their new exhibit, “Function and Design”. Seeing it made me think of what a beautiful thing culture is; here we are, surrounded by the work of so many artists, and each piece speaks to the culture that artist creates in, the concept of life that artist has and the power of that culture to define him or herself in every way.

So what makes your work your work? It’s the feel, the intrinsic ambiance and atmosphere it has—it’s the culture of your life. When I first moved home, and Meg and I started this wonderful adventure Green Couch Design, I was horribly unorganized and spastic. I was the proverbial chicken with its head cut off! I realized after about three weeks, ‘This isn’t going to work. I’m working when I should be playing, I’m playing when I should be working and I’m sleeping all the rest of the time.’ I oscillated between being a work-a-holic and a slob with such frequency that I was driving myself nuts. I needed to establish a schedule, a set of traditions, a motivating force that gave boundaries to my creative expression and purpose to my work. I needed to establish culture in my home that would connect me to the larger culture of the art and design community.

My dictionary defines culture as

“the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group: the youth culture; the drug culture.”

“Anthropology. the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.”

Honor, integrity, responsibility, and a strong work ethic are all taught and established in culture. Our culture started with a schedule and a commitment to not work on weekends. I continued that culture by establishing a daily routine and making space for creativity and inspiration. We developed our culture through connections and commitments to justice and giving, with love as a motivating force. Our faith and prayer were an intrinsic part of our historical culture and became part of our present culture. Expressions of creativity began to blossom out of that. All of these things began to give our culture color and vibrancy.  Culture isn’t just what you do; when it is established it defines you, like your name or your personality. That is the beauty of having a personal culture that is your own. It is something you create, but even as you go through the process of creating it, it defines who you are. Just like the artists in Untitled Art Space, we are known not by our face or even by our name, but by our work and the culture of what we create.

So the next time you feel caught in that revolving door and your heart is screaming, ‘stop,’ just remember that your personal culture can change that revolving door into a ladder of success. Culture will help you know who you are, what your goals should be and why. And to all those out there who love revolving doors, if you see a grown man racing his wife to the front of the building so he can trap her in the revolving door, it’s probably me.  ;)

From the Farm, Cale and Meg